The Hittite (3 page)

What the wench called a village was a miserable collection of huts at a fork in the road we had been following. Worse, another raider band was already there. Several of the huts were ablaze, sending foul-smelling black smoke billowing into the bright morning sky. Magro and I lay concealed in a stand of half-grown wheat on a terraced hillside overlooking the village. The rest of my men were hunkered down on the other side of the knoll, out of sight.

“They don’t look like soldiers,” Magro whispered to me.

“Neither do we,” I answered.

“Bronze weapons,” Magro pointed out.

I nodded. They were bandits, then, not former soldiers. Only soldiers of the old emperor were gifted with iron swords. Each one was worth a man’s weight in silver.

“Looks like they’re ready to leave,” I whispered.

The bandits must have hit the village the previous day and spent the night, taking their fill of the food and wine and women. Now they had rounded up all the ragged, bedraggled people in the bare little patch of dirt that passed for a village square and methodically, one by one, slit the throats of any man young enough to fight. The women screamed and wailed, the white-bearded old men sank to their knees. The young men, their hands bound behind them, fell like sheep, unable to defend
themselves. One of the women threw herself at the raiders but was knocked to the ground by a backhand cuff.

Once their grisly task was finished, the bandits piled as much loot as each of them could carry and staggered out onto the left fork of the road. The women ran to their slain sons and husbands, raking their faces with their nails to add their own blood to what was already soaking the ground.

“What now?” Magro asked me. “They’ve picked the place clean.”

Still watching the backs of the departing bandits, I answered him, “They’ve done half our work for us. Now all we need to do is take the goods they’ve collected away from them.”

“I counted twenty-seven of them.”

I nodded. “Most of them will run at the sight of us.”

“Twenty-seven,” Magro repeated, unconvinced.

It was easy to overtake the bandits. They were still half-drunk and encumbered with the loot they carried. We trailed them to a wooded area, where we could approach them unnoticed, screened by the trees and ground foliage, and fell on them savagely.

In a few moments it was all over. They were fatally surprised. I killed three of the louts myself. Zarton, our big farm boy from the Zagros Mountains, put away five of them— or so he claimed. I counted twenty-two bodies sprawled on the bloody ground. The others fled shrieking for their lives.

“Food, wine, clothing . . . they did well for themselves,” said little Karsh as we picked over the bundles the bandits had dropped.

“That village was richer than it looked,” Magro said.

“Pick it up, all of it,” I told the men.

“There’s too much! How can we carry all this?” Even Zarton, who towered over most of us, looked unhappy at shouldering such a burden.

“We won’t be carrying it far,” I told them. “We’re bringing it back to the village.”

“Bringing it
back
?”

“We don’t need all this, and they’ll be very grateful to us for returning even half of it.”

They stared at me in disbelief. Only Magro seemed to understand what I was up to.

“You want to know which fork of the road leads to Troy,” he said to me softly as we trudged back to the village, laden with their goods.

I answered him with a nod. The men were sweating and grumbling, but I had to know which road the slavers had taken. I could not rest while there was still a chance that I might find my sons and my wife.

Would I have come so far if it was only my wife the slavers had taken? I wondered. She was a woman, and there are many women in the world. Yet she was the mother of my sons, and those two little boys were what drove me on. So I sought the fruit of my loins, driven by a dying old man’s will, while my men trudged unhappily back to the village the raiders had looted.

The villagers were indeed grateful, once they realized we intended to return some of their goods to them, rather than cause them more harm. They were a sad and pitiful lot, their young men still sprawled on the blood-soaked earth, their women still kneeling over them, crying and keening. The biting iron stench of their blood filled the air; if the women and old men did not get the corpses buried soon, there would be even worse smells.

The village’s white-bearded headman gladly told me that the right fork led toward Troy, but he had no idea how far the city might be.

“I have heard of it,” he told me, trying to maintain some shred of dignity in his quavering voice. “No one from this village has ever gone there.”

No one from this village has ever gone farther than the wheat fields and dung-spattered sheep pastures of the nearby hills, I thought.

I ordered my men to gather up enough food to feed us for a few days and enough trinkets and baubles to use as trade goods at the next village we came to. The villagers did not object. They could not, even if they desired to.

We left them standing there amid their dead, wailing to their gods.

The sun was high and hot as we climbed the wooded slope that led up to the next ridgeline. Suddenly Zarton dropped the loot he was carrying and rested his long spear against a tree.

“I’m going back,” he announced.

The men all stopped. I had been in the lead, so I had to turn around to face our mountain man.

“What do you mean?” I asked, stepping past half a dozen of the men to stand before Zarton.

He shrugged, a big, slow-witted powerful young ox. “I’m going back to that village. I’m not going on with you.”

I glanced at the men closest to me. Some seemed puzzled by Zarton’s words, but a few were nodding with understanding. Why keep on this grueling trek across the ruins of the empire when we can settle down in that village and be welcomed by the widows and daughters who need men to protect them? I saw it in their eyes.

“You are a soldier, Zarton,” I said evenly. “You follow orders just as the rest do. My orders.”

He shook his head stubbornly. “There’s no empire anymore, Lukka. Why keep up the pretense?”

They all knew why. We were fighting our way toward Troy to find my wife and sons. It was my will that drove us on now, not the emperor’s,
but I had to be just as hard and inflexible as he had been. Otherwise we would all be lost and I would never find my sons.

“Pick up your goods and get back on the march,” I commanded.

He actually grinned at me. “I’m not a soldier anymore, Lukka. I quit.”

“You can’t quit. Not unless I allow you to.”

Zarton stood up a little straighter. The other men edged away from us.

“I’m going back to the village,” he repeated, slowly, stubbornly.

“No you’re not.”

Usually he was an easygoing, amiable sort. But like the ox he resembled, he could be obstinate. And dangerous. Yet I knew that if I allowed him to leave, several of the other men would go with him. Discipline would evaporate. My squad would disintegrate before my eyes and I would have no chance what ever of reaching distant Troy.

Zarton gripped his spear in one ham-sized fist. It was more than half again his own considerable height. He looked at me with real sadness in his ice-blue eyes.

“I don’t want to hurt you, Lukka. Don’t stand in my way.”

“I don’t want to kill you, boy, but if you don’t obey me I’ll be forced to.”

I had no spear, only the sword in its scabbard by my side. Being left-handed is an advantage in a sword fight because most men are accustomed to fight against right-handers, and my left-handed stance confuses them. But this would not be a sword fight: Zarton hefted his spear.

Before any of the other men could make up their minds about which of us to back, I said loudly: “Stand back, all of you. This is between Zarton and me, no one else.”

They gladly backed away.

“This is wrong, Lukka,” said Zarton, his heavy brows knitting sullenly.

“Don’t make me kill you,” I said evenly. “Put the spear down and obey my orders.”

Shaking his head in disbelief, Zarton closed his other hand around the haft of his spear. But before he could lower its iron point at me I leaped at him, drawing my sword in the same motion.

He staggered back against the tree, shocked, and I stuck the point of my sword into his gut, just below the breastbone, and rammed the full length of the blade up into his chest. He looked surprised, his eyes wide with astonishment that I had not waited for him to set himself. Then his expression faded to a bewildered confusion as his mouth filled with bright red blood and his legs no longer supported him.

With a feeble little gasp Zarton collapsed against the tree’s rough bark and slid to the ground. His eyes stayed open but they went cold and dead.

Yanking my sword from his body, I turned to face the other men. They all seemed just as shocked as Zarton had been.

“We march to Troy. I don’t care how far it is or how many battles we have to fight to get there. We march to Troy. Is that understood?”

They nodded and muttered.

“Troy is a great city. It rules the Dardanelles and the Aegean beyond the straits. We can find a place in the service of the Trojan king,” I told them. “ We can become true soldiers again, instead of marauding robbers.”

Perhaps they believed me. Perhaps not. I didn’t care, not at that moment with foolish young Zarton lying dead at my feet with the flies already buzzing about him. I knew only one thing for certain: I would reach Troy or die in the trying. I picked up his spear and pointed with it down the road toward Troy.

We marched.

Yet that night, after a long day’s trek, I saw Zarton again in my dreams. He rose out of the grave I had dug for him and stared at me from the underworld beyond the Styx, shaking his head sadly, sadly, his eyes brimming with tears.

In his arms he held my two baby boys.

It was nearly sunset, two days after I had killed Zarton. We were picking our way slowly down a gradual slope, through the undergrowth of a forest that had once been thick with lofty, broad-boled trees. But now half the trees had been cut down, their stumps overgrown with ferns and twisting vines. In the distance we heard the sound of woodcutters chopping away methodically.

That meant a village had to be nearby, or perhaps a larger town. Without a word of command from me, the men spread out, hefting their spears and moving silently through the underbrush, schooled by long experience.

The chunking sound of the axes grew louder as we made our way through the woods. The trees thinned even more, and I motioned the men to drop to their knees. Through the screening underbrush I saw a team of half-naked ax men sweating away at their work in the lengthening shadows of the dying day. Four of them were cutting wood, six more were scurrying to pile the cut logs into a lopsided cart pulled by a big dun-colored bullock patiently munching his cud.

“Move! Move, you dogs!” bellowed a mean-faced taskmaster at the team. His accent was harsh, barely understandable. “You’ve got to get this cart loaded and back in camp before the sun goes down.”

His men were bone-thin, ragged, staggering under the loads they carried.

“And you whoresons!” roared the taskmaster. “Swing those axes or by the gods you’ll think Zeus’ thunderbolts are landing on your backs!”

He brandished a many-thonged whip. He was a big man with powerful bare arms, but a potbelly hung out through his leather vest. Shaved bald, he had a thick bushy beard the color of cinnamon and a livid scar running down one side of his ugly face.

The woodcutters were guarded by five spearmen in leather jerkins studded with bronze bolts. Their spear points were bronze, I saw. Probably the short swords hanging at their sides were, too. Each of them wore little conical helmets that looked, at this distance, to be leather rather than metal.

Off in the hazy horizon the setting sun was tinting the clouds with flaming red. Beyond the edge of the forest and a bare dusty plain that stretched on the other side of a meandering river, I could make out the battlements of a walled city.

Troy!

The city was built on a dark bluff, and beyond it I could see the glittering silver of the sea. It had to be Troy, it could be no other, I told myself. We had reached our destination at last.

Five armed soldiers keeping watch over fewer than a dozen woodcutters. The soldiers looked young, callow. I decided we could afford a peaceful approach.

“On your feet, all of you, and follow me,” I said to my men in a low voice. “That’s Troy there in the distance. We’re almost there.”

Magro huffed with disbelief. “Don’t tell me we’ll sleep under a roof to night.”

I grinned at him as I hefted Zarton’s spear. “Come on.”

The young spearmen stiffened with surprise as we stepped out of the foliage and presented ourselves. They gripped their long bronze-tipped spears and backed away from us a few steps. We were twelve to their five.

The loudmouthed whip master fell silent. The woodcutters stopped their work and gaped at us. They were sweating, filthy, bare to the waist,
mostly emaciated old men barely strong enough to lift an ax. They stared about wildly, as if they would break and run at the slightest excuse.

“Is that city Troy?” I asked, pointing with my right hand. I gripped the spear in my left, of course.

“Who are you?” one of the spearmen demanded, his youthful voice cracking with surprise and fear. “What are you doing here?”

I barely understood him. He spoke a dialect that I had never heard before, heavy and guttural. It had been many months since anyone had spoken Hatti to us; we had learned the local language as we trekked across the land.

“ We are Hatti soldiers, from far to the east. We seek the city of Troy.”

It took some while, but gradually I made them understand that we meant them no harm. The young spearmen told me that Troy was under siege by a huge army of Achaians, kings and princes of a hundred cities from the far side of the Aegean, or so he claimed. They themselves were part of the besieging Achaian army, sent out to guard this pitiful band of foragers who were gathering firewood. A pretty poor army, I thought.

“You can’t enter the city,” the young leader of the spearmen told me. “The High King Agamemnon would never allow trained warriors to pass through his lines.”

We had arrived in the middle of a war. Where my wife and sons might be was anyone’s guess.

“Then I must see this Agamemnon,” I said.

“See the High King?” the spearman’s voice squeaked with awe.

“Yes, if he is the leader of your army.”

“But he’s the High King! He speaks only to princes and other kings.”

“He will want to speak to me,” I said, with a confidence I did not truly feel. “I am an officer in the army of the Hatti. I can be of great service to him.”

In truth, the spearman was little more than a beardless youth. The thought of going before his High King seemed to fill him with terror. At last he called one of the wood-loaders, a scrawny, knobby-kneed old man with a mangy, unkempt dirty gray beard and bald head shining with sweat.

“Poletes,” the youth commanded, his voice still fluttering slightly, “take these men to the camp and turn them over to the High King’s lieutenant.”

The old man nodded eagerly, glad to be free of his heavy work, and led us down toward the slow-flowing river.

“That’s the plain of Ilios,” said Poletes, pointing to the other side of the river as we followed its winding bank.

His voice was surprisingly strong and deep for such a wizened old gnome. His face was hollow-cheeked beneath its grime, with eyes that bulged like a frog’s. He wore nothing but a filthy rag around his loins. Even in the fading light of the dying day I could see his ribs and the bumps of his spine poking out beneath his nut-brown skin. There were welts from a whip across his back, too.

“You are Hittites?” he asked me as we walked slowly along.

“Yes,” I said. “In our tongue we call ourselves Hatti.”

“The Hittites are a powerful empire,” he said, surprising me with the knowledge. “Have you come to aid Troy? How many of your army are with you?”

I decided it was best to tell him nothing. “Such things I will tell your High King.”

“Ah. Of course. No sense blabbing to a
thes
.”

That word I did not know. “Where are you from?” I asked.

“Argos. And I wish I were there now, instead of toiling like a dog here in this doomed place.”

“What brought you here?”

He looked up at me and scratched his bald pate. “Not what. Who. Agamemnon’s haughty wife, that’s who. Clytemnestra, who is even more faithless than her sister, Helen.”

It must have been obvious to him that I did not understand, but he went right on, hardly drawing a breath.

“A storyteller am I, and happy I was to spend my days in the agora, spinning tales of gods and heroes and watching the faces of the people as I talked. Especially the children, with their big eyes. But this war has put an end to my storytelling.”

“How so?”

He wiped his mouth with the back of his grimy hand. “My lord Agamemnon may need more warriors, but his faithless wife wants
thetes
.”

“Slaves?”

“Hah! Worse off than slaves. Far worse,” Poletes grumbled. He jerked a thumb back toward the men we had left; I could still hear the distant chunking of their axes. “Look at us! Homeless and hopeless. At least a slave has a master to depend upon. A slave belongs to someone; he is a member of a house hold. A
thes
belongs to no one and nothing; he is landless, homeless, cut off from everything except sorrow and hunger.”

“But weren’t you a member of a house hold in Argos?” I asked.

He bowed his head and squeezed his eyes shut as if to block out a painful memory.

“ A house hold, yes,” he said, his voice dropping low. “Until Queen Clytemnestra’s men booted me out of the city for repeating what every stray dog and alley cat in Argos was saying— that the queen has taken a lover while her royal husband is here fighting at Troy’s walls.”

I raised my hand to stop our march. Even though the sun was setting, the day was still broiling hot and the river looked cool and inviting. I sat down on the grassy bank and, leaning far over, scooped up a helmetful of clear water. The men did the same. A few even splashed into the river, laughing and thrashing about like boys.

I drank my fill while Poletes slid down the slippery grass into the water and cupped his hands to drink. Watching the brown filth eddying from his legs, I was glad that I had filled my helmet first.

“Well,” I said, wiping sweat from my brow, “at least the queen’s men didn’t kill you.”

“Better if they had,” Poletes replied grimly. “I would be dead and in Hades and that would be the end of it. Instead I’m here, toiling like a jackass, working for wages.”

“That’s something, anyway,” I said.

His frog’s eyes snapped at me. Still standing shanks-deep in the river, he grabbed at the soiled little purse tied to his waist and opened its mouth enough for me to peer in. A handful of dried lentils.

“My wages,” he said bitterly.

“That is your payment?”

“For the day’s work. Show me a
thes
with coin in his purse and I’ll show you a sneak thief.”

I shook my head, then got to my feet and motioned my men to do the same.

“Lower than a slave, that’s what I am,” Poletes grumbled as I lent him my arm and hauled him out of the water. “Vermin under their feet. They treat their dogs better. They’ll work me to death and let my bones rot where I fall.”